Keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic essentials:
COMMENTS. Welcoming comments provide opportunity for dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer feedback mechanism. This helps develop better customer relations based from loyalty and trust. Blogging is an innovative way to converse with your customers.
TRACKBACK. This helps in maximizing company and product exposure. Through this service, consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of locating you. If your blog is popular in a specific online community chances are links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.
CATEGORIES AND TAGS. These both help in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation and on site search. Categories act as libraries because it classifies posts by subject matter such as business, distance learning, e-commerce, online auctions, etc. Tags, help in the classification, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.
RSS FEED. Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders and aggregators.
After, choosing the blog host, a team should be ready to plan the design and structure of the blog: The team should:
- create a style that meets the needs of the audience;
- establish an open, credible tone;
- schedule weekly updating of blog - ideally, a few times a week;
- include weblinks of other website and blogs;
- blog post should be in the "first person;"
- focus on the business blog objective; and,
- maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.